Thanks, Chair.
I guess I'm having a little trouble understanding what the intention of this motion is. Perhaps Mr. Perkins can enlighten us further on his intentions here.
This particular topic has been studied and studied. There have been, of course, the Auditor's General report and the Ethics Commissioner's investigation and findings, and we've have had this particular motion introduced at public accounts as well. It's exactly the same and was adjourned. The committee there, I believe, adjourned debate on this motion. That's a matter of the public record, I believe, but what I'm interested in here is trying to understand the motives behind the motion.
We know that the board was dissolved, the CEO and chair resigned, the people who were at SDTC are no longer there and the organization is being folded into the NRC with rigorous oversight, which obviously could be an improvement for sure. What I'm trying to get my head around is what the objective is here. What are we trying to accomplish in using up more committee time? At the public accounts committee, the members decided not to move forward with a study on this topic. I find that kind of interesting. They could take that up at any point, obviously, since this was moved at that committee as well.
Here is the thing I'm struggling with. We know that the companies out there that are the mom-and-pop type of clean-tech companies across Canada rely on this funding to continue to scale up and do the work that they do, which is to grow their businesses in Canada. We've said for many years that they punch above their weight and that they need access to those funds. The funds had been stalled, or we pushed pause on those funds going out, for the whole time that all of these independent reviews and investigations were taking place.
This is now, I think, an intention to go after the small.... The companies are not the guilty parties here. The people who mismanaged the organization—or there were allegations of mismanagement—have been held to account. We've called them to committee numerous times. We've, in my view, studied this to death. I guess what I'm trying to get at is, what's the intention? Why are we now trying to go after the industry itself?
This seems to be an attempt to essentially have all of these.... This says that “new project approvals have now started”. Well, that's the intention. The intention is that SDTC, which had been around for over 20 years, which was funded by the Honourable Michelle Rempel Garner.... In fact, when she was minister, there was $300 million that went to SDTC. It's not as if previous Conservative and Liberal governments didn't support this organization. In fact, we all did. Why? It was because we all know the value of supporting our clean-tech industry.
What I find hard here is that it seems as though the Conservatives are never satisfied with getting to the bottom of something. Our government has, over and over again.... The minister has been clear, I've been clear, we've all participated in these studies and we haven't fought you. We have said: “Okay, let's get to the bottom of this. We want answers too.”
We've done that over and over again, and now the Conservatives are not satisfied. They want to do it more and to do it in a way that harms the clean-tech industry. Why would you want to harm the small mom-and-pop businesses out there that rely on this funding? Is it the intention here to eradicate the entire clean-tech industry? Is it to pull these people before committee and question their legitimacy as businesses? To me, that's unacceptable. I don't think we need to use committee time for that.
To me, if we've all agreed in the past that better oversight is needed, that there were some technical violations, as the Ethics Commissioner had said.... I know that the Conservatives keep pumping up their little misinformation campaign—